Using iFrame: SEO and Accessibility Points

IFrame (inline frame) is an HTML element that makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main one. It has become one of the most popular ways to embed interactive and multimedia content inside the block of text.

SEO:

Points to remember:

* The content in an iframe is not considered part of the parent page.
* The page within an iframe may be spidered and indexed (or it may be not) but no PR is definitely passed.

Here’s a nice comment by JohnMu on Google indexing iFrames (found via forum discussion):

I wouldn’t count on content which you are including as an iframe on being crawled and indexed within the context of your pages… If you want to make sure that they aren’t indexed at all, you may want to use “noindex” robots meta tags…

* If you want to pass PageRank to the source page, add href=”direct-link-of-the-source-here” between <iframe></iframe> tags (mind that it is believed but actually no confirmed that a link within an iFrame passes PageRank. If you really want the source page to accumulate some PR, be sure to add a direct link to the page before or after the iframe element).

The iFrame source code looks as follows:



Google’s text version has the following in place of the iframe (the iframe is rendered as a direct link):